submit your Stata work along with your paper. Stata .do and .log files must either be copied and pasted in the same Word document as the write-up or appended to the write-up and everything must be submitted as a single PDF document.
The final paper is meant to be an empirical paper in a policy area of interest to you. You may draw upon any secondary data that are available either as nationally representative datasets or datasets collected by researchers for specific projects. You may choose any of the estimation techniques covered in class.

Expected length of the paper is 3000 words excluding tables, charts, and references.

The paper must include the following components:
1. Background, research question (policy relevant), and hypotheses: This section must situate your question in the policy as well as theoretical context.
2. Data and methodology: This section must describe the data and lay out the estimation strategy that you have chosen.
3. Results: This section must include your main findings as well as results from any supporting tests and robustness checks.
4. Discussion: This section must discuss the results in relation to the background, theory, and hypotheses.
5. Conclusion: This section must summarize your main findings. Do not over-generalize your analyses.

Given the timeline, the suggestion is that you choose a fairly narrow question which requires a modest volume of data. Whatever estimation technique you choose make sure that you specify the model correctly paying attention to the nature of the variables (continuous, dummy, or categorical) and functional forms. Wherever necessary, test the assumptions and conduct robustness checks.